Custom Toolbars (Office 2000 Windows 2000 Still in planning states so don

I am in the planning stages for a 3K+ document effort on files converted from AS400. I can see a lot of feature/macro opportunities and am considering custom tool bar(s) to ease their use. Will be writing custom templates, of course. Eventually, the project will involve 25+ writers.

Re: Custom Toolbars (Office 2000 Windows 2000 Still in planning states so

Hi Jul,
I've carried out similar projects and they are fun!! Getting it organised that is, not the actual formatting!

Anyway, Charles is right, you need to look at creating a template to base this document on, creating within that template all the appropriate styles and creating custom toolbars with shortcuts to apply the styles, and also other formatting that is carried out by macros. You should also assign shortcut keys to the most used styles and macros. People who are involved with lots of formatting often prefer to use the keyboard as it is usually much quicker than the mouse.

If you are converting a document you will need a different set of macros, than if you were creating the document from scratch. I usually have a formatting toolbar, and a reformat toolbar - the reformat toolbar contains shortcuts to macros that remove extra paragraph markers, spaces, tabs etc. and the formatting toolbar contains shortcuts to the styles that you want to use.

Re: Custom Toolbars (Office 2000 Windows 2000 Still in planning states so

See <A target="_blank" HREF=http://www.addbalance.com/word/movetotemplate.htm> Portable Customizations</A> (addbalance.com/word/movetotemplate.htm) for some thoughts.

Also see: <A target="_blank" HREF=http://www.addbalance.com/usersguide/templates.htm> Template Basics</A> (addbalance.com/usersguide/templates.htm) for more on templates (user and workgroup), document templates, global templates and Normal.dot. This also includes how the files are organized under File New and the location of template folders which varies not only by version of Word but also by operating system. Also see
<A target="_blank" HREF=http://www.mvps.org/word/FAQs/Customization/CreateATemplatePart2.htm>How to Create a Template (Part 2)</A>, an excellent tutorial on the way to create a template that will not corrupt easily and that has a numbering structure tied to styles. If you download the Word version, it comes with a template built to these specifications for a manual or book.

There's a new article on the MVP FAQ site on button faces that might help, too. <A target="_blank" HREF=http://www.mvps.org/word/FAQs/MacrosVBA/CustomButtonFaces.htm> Assigning Custom Button Faces to Your Toolbar and Menu Buttons</A>.